 | | | | Related Healthscout Videos | |
|
By Vivian Richardson, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Women with very dense breast tissue have a four- to six-times higher chance of developing breast cancer than women with low-density breasts. There are, however, steps women with dense breast tissue can take to decrease their risk.
Text Continues Below
Dense breast tissue is seen in mammograms as mostly white areas of the breast. Of the three components of breast tissue, only fat shows up as dark areas. Glandular tissue (the part of the breast responsible for making and storing milk) and fibrous tissue (structural fibers helping the breast hold its shape) show up as white areas.
Tumors will show up as white areas in mammograms, too. This explains why women with dense breast tissue often find out about cancer later than women with less dense tissue, making their cancer more difficult to treat.
"You can't tell by the size or shape of the breast whether it's dense. Really, the only way you can tell is from a mammogram or a medical image of the breast," Martin Yaffe, Ph.D., a medical physicist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the University of Toronto, told Ivanhoe. He co-authored the new a new study looking into how breast density is related to the overall risk of breast cancer.
To quantify how dense a woman's breast tissue is, researchers used mammogram images and classified them according to what percentage of the image was white because of fibrous or glandular tissue.
Researchers report women with density in 75 percent or more of their mammograms had 4.7-times higher risk of breast cancer than women with 10 percent or less density in their mammograms. More than a quarter of breast cancer cases in women younger than 56 will be in women with density in 50 percent of their mammograms.
There may be ways women can protect themselves, according to Dr. Yaffe. "We don't completely know what causes density, but we certainly think it's related to some extent to diet. It's suggested that a high fat diet may actually be partially responsible for breast density," he said.
Breast tissue becomes less dense as women age. It's important to note the researchers do not say younger women are at an increased risk of breast cancer because of their dense breast tissue. The researcher compared women of similar ages to each other. Young women who have denser breast tissue than other women of the same age would have a higher risk of developing breast cancer.
Women with highly dense breast tissue may need to ask their doctors about more sensitive alternatives to mammograms, like digital mammography, ultrasound scans and magnetic resonance imaging.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
SOURCE: Ivanhoe interview with Martin Yaffe, Ph.D.; The New England Journal of Medicine, 2006;356:227-236
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
|
.gif)
